Procedimientos para la Respuesta

Active Curation

Curation can be undertaken very deliberately, such as in making a photo display (Durrant et al., 2009a), or a time capsule (Petrelli et al, 2010). People can have clear and creative intentions about how or what they wish to remember, and Petrelli et al. (2010) emphasise the importance of such ‘active meaning building’ in contrast to passive capture, in relation to lifelogs. The implication is that people are more likely to value things they have

personalised, and have invested time and effort in, rather than those that have effortlessly accumulated.

Watkins et al. (2015) report on collections as a more refined example of curation, which are distinct from digital archives or clutter. From Belk et al. (1991), collections are selective, active and entail longitudinal acquisition. Examples of digital collections could include video game items or achievements or media such as eBooks and music. For digital things, the authors emphasise the need to enable users to “to mark [collections] elevated status by separating them from other possessions and to impose their own structures of meaning.” (Watkins et al., 2015, p.3421)

Curation-through-use

Where digital possessions are subject to careful impression management, especially on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, (Marwick and Boyd, 2014; Schoenebeck et al., 2016) curation becomes inherent to use (Zhao and Lindley, 2014). Sites have different bars and norms for what should be posted. If Facebook is considered as a form of archive, it’s clear that what makes it into that archive is very dependent on the evolving features and cultures of use of Facebook as a platform.

Whether with foresight, or through use, curation is a form of identity work, a means of presenting and reflecting on oneself. However, people are also found to experience tension between past and present self-representation needs. They seek to reflect current identity, and experience a certain temporal ‘fixity’ (Harper et al., 2012) in certain online spaces, particularly the need to update social media where novelty is prioritised.

Simultaneously, many have described feeling a need to maintain the authenticity of past content. Schoenebeck et al. (2016) report mixed feelings and practices of retrospective impression management with young adults. Though they sought to accept their pasts as

they were, most still curated some of their past content to match their present self- perception. At home, Kirk and Sellen (2010) describe how things can be taken off

‘display’ and put into ‘deep storage’ to be forgotten. Online, this is more challenging, with deletion perceived as blunt response to the nuanced needs of identity work.

Curatorial practices

The literature exhibits a range of strategies and structures by which the presence and access to digital possessions can be curated. A straightforward measure is to give digital things physical form. Odom et al., (2011) reports teenagers printing out screenshots of social media content. Screensavers, digital photo frames and personalised calendars all open up a physical space for digital content (Durrant et al., 2009a, 2009b). More

elaborate efforts, including many by HCI researchers involve ‘hybrid crafting’ (Golsteijn et al., 2014) where tangible physical objects represent, re-situate or provide new windows on to digital content and traces. Golsteijn et al., (2012) emphasise the role that personal crafting of an object can make it feel cherished; working on it can be a mode of self- expression and investment. Such thinking suggests “looking beyond the physical as a mere container for the digital” and “exploiting the advantages of the physical for this integration.” (Golsteijn et al., 2012, p.663).

Much curation relies on organisational structures: making particular folders or albums; linking different content together; tagging; bookmarking or marking favourites; filtering or reordering possessions by chronology, location or another characteristic in their metadata. Clearly the selective uploading of content, for example, preserving the ‘best’ photos for an Instagram or Flickr account is inherently a form of curation. Curation can entail appropriating content, editing it, mashing it up and putting it to another use. These practices all represent ways of deleting and elevating certain content above others. Alternatively, curation relies on ways to eliminate trivial things, or ‘digital dross’ (Marshall et al., 2006). This might mean simply cleaning up duplicates, throwing away the old or unwanted. Nonetheless, despite all these actions, (Harper et al., 2013) argue for the need to investigate and develop a better ‘grammar of action’ for curation.

Designing for Curation

Despite the creative approaches and workarounds that mark out some digital things from others, this prior work evidences a lack of appropriate features to manage and curate

one’s digital possessions. Further, whether carefully intended, or haphazardly through use, it is repeatedly clear that while curation is necessary for making meaning from one’s digital possessions, in many cases it is much too effortful. People seem to curate more in response to storage limits (for example deleting extraneous smartphone photos),

impression management, or for special occasions (i.e. a significant birthday), than purely for themselves. As Kirk et al. (2006, 2007) found with ‘photo-work’ and ‘video-work’, people often simply do what is ‘good enough’, practicing ‘benign neglect’ (Marshall et al., 2006). These present significant challenges and opportunities to interaction designers. It is in this context that algorithms increasingly have a role on what information is

presented to us and how it is curated. ‘Curatorial agents’ have been proposed to better support curation. (Gulotta et al., 2015) Location and timestamp metadata can be

interpreted to suggest photographs that belong together, perhaps representing a particular trip or event. Facebook’s ‘On This Day’ feature, among others, repackages content on the site as ‘memories’ to enjoy and share. Gulotta et al. (2015) speculate further about how much agency and generativity systems could have in curating and presenting information to users based on their digital traces. Seen to support reminiscence and reflection, these can overlook how transgressive such actions can be, and the difficulties artificial systems have in becoming proactive in re-presenting and re-constituting the past. This seems all the more challenging given the evidently diverse, personal and indeed organically cluttered (Swan et al., 2008) ways people wish to organise their belongings.

There is something of a paradox here though; more active curation is more meaningful, but the effort required to do this is frequently too great, or even resisted. Automated solutions have so far proved problematic. As this thesis turns attention to data, two important possibilities emerge. First, data might be used as a kind of metadata to help curate and punctualise other media. Location data is already a common mode of

organising photographs. But second, what about curating data itself? These are questions I will return to.

2.3.5. Summary

In part three of this literature review, I have sought to chart the long arc of research on ‘technologies of memory’ in HCI. We have seen a considered evolution from more simplistic lifelogging perspectives, prioritising total capture and veridical recall, towards

understanding remembering more broadly, and considering lived experiences with a mass of digital possessions. Such work is fruitfully complemented by sociological and media studies of a new memory ecology. Digital possessions, like physical ones have many roles, practices and values; for defining the self over the lifespan, shaping legacy and sharing personal narratives.

However, the literature highlights some particular challenges and opportunities for remembering with digital possessions. People tend towards a more passive ‘benign neglect’, unless exceptional circumstances dictate otherwise. Concepts of ownership and possession become more fraught in a digital landscape, with things existing in many places and forms at once. Assuredly deleting, forgetting or even putting digital things in deep storage is also complicated by cloud technologies. Entwined with their

unpredictable location, there is a risk of encountering a ‘past next door’. Careful curation is required to address many of these issues and to mark out meaningful belongings, but this is frequently too effortful.

This thesis does not aim to resolve these issues; each offers thesis topics on their own. However, across all of this work there has been a recurring interest in the materiality of remembering with digital possessions. The primary focus in this prior work has been on social media, photographs, web digital traces (e.g. email, messaging), visual and written records of activity. These digital traces are a melange of intentional and increasingly unintentional documentation of one’s life. My thesis extends this interest. In this final section, I will weave these prior parts of related work together to make the case: that self- tracking tools are new technologies of memory; that quantified data is a new kind of digital possession; materially and culturally different from many other kinds of records. In so doing, I will set up the fundamental contributions of this thesis, and the questions it seeks to address.